We don’t believe in aggressive monetisation, says Google Pay’s Sharath Bulusu

Sharath Bulusu of Google Pay

The country’s second-largest mobile payments firm Google Pay does not believe in an aggressive intent towards merchant acquisition or monetisation as its approach is a bit different from others, according to Sharath Bulusu, director of product management at the fintech app run by the search giant.

“We are part of a big company, but still a relatively small team. Different players have different approaches and ours was a bit methodical and wanted to do products deeply and well,” Bulusu said.

Among the early adopters of the direct and instant bank money transfer platform, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Google has been slow to monetise its large market share. Google Pay has around 37 percent of the UPI payments market.

Paytm focuses on merchants and is a market leader in the segment with its pioneering soundbox turning out to be popular with small merchants. Since 2019, PhonePe has also aggressively targeted merchants.

Paytm has close to 11 million merchants subscribed to its payment devices whereas PhonePe has around 7.5 million subscriptions. Google Pay numbers are not known but the industry estimates it to be around 4.5 million.

According to Bulusu the company’s initial focus was to enable customers comfortable with digital payments and gain trust in using a platform for payments and not think about monetisation and that has not changed even now.

However, Bulusu disagrees that there is a lack of urgency for monetising or competitiveness from Google. For instance, a Paytm home page or a PhonePe homepage is crammed with multiple products and services that these companies cross-sell and can be monetised.

“I am generally pleased with the direction we have taken so far. I think there's a lot to be said for building a simple, beautiful product, and in the long run, that matters a lot. It is not just Google Pay historically, over and over again, Google has done things in user experience that other companies have said, is borderline stupid,” Bulusu said.

He pointed out that most of the Google products such as Gmail and Google Search had clean ad-free interfaces for a long time. The search home page even today is free of ads. Google started monetising its popular Maps after a decade of providing it for free to consumers and businesses.

“We invest heavily in user research and the team is almost as big as my design team. They work as partners because we don't just design in isolation. We go out into the field, we talk to users, and the design we have chosen is a result of our conviction that there are times when simplicity, and especially in matters of finance, just pushing users to go take a product, I am not sure is the right answer,” he said.

According to him, the Google's philosophy is that a simpler, cleaner product will, in the long run, monetise a lot better and will be economically sustainable. He added that this does not mean that others are wrong in pursuing an aggressive approach to monetisation.

“Every product is built with a certain customer segment in mind, with a certain objective in mind, different products will be successful. There are products that look very different from Google products that succeed in the same markets,” Bulusu said.

Market share loss

The lack of aggression was not just restricted to monetisation, but also in advertising or promotions. A market leader in the initial phase of UPI, Google Pay lost out the pole position to PhonePe.

He said that UPI still has room to grow from around 400 million unique users now to potentially add another 200 million over the next few years.

“It is also premature to be worrying about who has got what share. My take is that at this point as an ecosystem, we should be worrying a lot more about creating a competitive marketplace and getting more and more players into the fold,” Bulusu said.

In fact, between 2017 and 2019, Google Pay was so popular, that it became a verb for person-to-person payments in the country. During much of 2018, Google Pay, then called Tez, had more than 40 percent market share in the ecosystem.

“When a market is young, I think these numbers will oscillate, because, different players, different features at different times, will work differently for for users. I think if I had to take exactly one thing right, that makes a big difference, it is just getting the basics right,” Bulusu said.

According to Bulusu, this is still only the middle chapter for UPI with a lot more growth and competition happening in the space.

“A lot of different things are changing. Because of this what I expect is the shape of the ecosystem will probably keep evolving,” Bulusu added.